Reviews and News about British, European and Translated crime fiction, tv and film.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Another first book in a series receives translation

Recently we've had Vargas's first Adamsberg (The Chalk Circle Man) and Nesser's first Van Veteeren (The Mind's Eye) published after a number of later entries in the series have been translated. And now it's the turn of DCI Erik Winter...Penguin US are publishing Ake Edwardson's first Winter novel - Death Angels on 29 September.

Synopsis from amazon.com: A long-time number one bestseller in his native Sweden, Åke Edwardson’s profile was conspicuously raised when his novel Frozen Tracks was chosen as a finalist for a 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Until now, however, the novel that launched Edwardson’s critically acclaimed Erik Winter series has never been available in the United States. With a new series translator who fully captures Edwardson’s signature atmospheric style, Death Angels is America’s introduction to Sweden’s youngest Chief Inspector as he teams up with Scotland Yard to solve the mysterious parallel killings of young British and Swedish tourists. Richly evocative of mid-nineties South London and Gothenburg, Sweden, Death Angels is a brilliant opening to a mesmerizing series that has become a phenomenon in international crime fiction.

The translator for Death Angels is Ken Schubert. Laurie Thompson has translated the three already available. My bibliography for Ake Edwardson is a little out of date as I hadn't realised this was #1 in the series.

2 comments:

Thanks for the Ake mention; I will add these books to my reading list. I have a slight preference for reading in order, but sometimes I start with a series book that has won an award or has been nominated. The logic being show me your best stuff and I'll see if I'm really hooked. Where I think that really paid off for me was with the Ian Rankin Rebus series, which I started in the middle then read through to the end then back to the early books. After reading books #1-6 in that series, I am not sure I would have gone further with that series if I had started from the beginning - and the last dozen of that series turned out to be some of my all time favorites. Obviously, that approach wouldn't work with a lot of series, e.g. Steig Larsson's three. Ciao, Ken